1455 Recently we have all been through a step change in the sharing of information like that experienced by Europeans of the 15th and 16th centuries. Ours is the internet; theirs was the invention of printing with movable alphabetical type.
First came writing, though at first that didn’t advance literature so much as state bureaucracy. Early papyri and clay tablets were inventories, receipts, lists of payment in beer to manual workers, at a time when imaginative literature like epics and lyric poems were sung or spoken from memory.
Another great leap forward was the codex – the book as we know it, with lots of pages bound together along one edge. This had two advantages over the scroll: you could write on both sides of the page, and (much more important) the reader could flick to different parts of the text much more quickly – like moving from videotapes to DVDs.
But books had to be either written by hand or printed from elaborately carved woodblocks, which limited their distribution to the elites of church and state. Printing using type that could be set up, used for multiple copies, then distributed and ultimately used again for another text introduced mass production to the mix.
What Gutenberg did was to take a wine press, add a padded flat surface to the bottom of the screw, and below that a ‘chase’ or frame in which to clamp the type and its spacers. The type was inked with a roller, paper or vellum placed over it, and the upper surface screwed down. Trained as a goldsmith, Gutenberg knew what alloy would make the type able to withstand repeated use. He also worked out that ink based on oil rather than water would stick better to the type.
Gutenberg’s idea to print the whole of St Jerome’s Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments was itself a radical step, since most worshippers in a Catholic service would know the Bible only through the missal – a sort of anthology of scripture with certain selected texts to be read out on a particular day. Though his massive Bible remained expensive, within a little over half a century printing had spread to over 2,000 cities in Europe, and had got much cheaper. When Bibles became affordable, people could gain direct access to God’s word without the mediation of the parish priest – the fundamental principle of the Reformation.
To speed the process reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin could now publish their sermons and religious tracts more cheaply. Before long came political pamphlets, newspapers, street ballads – even (eventually) imaginative literature. As print capitalism spread, so more and more people wanted to learn how to read. The process of enlightenment was reciprocal. ‘We change our tools’, as Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, has said of the internet, ‘and then our tools change us.’